I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain–until I met him

delis-thumbs-7e

I missed out on the whole Bourdain-thing, but being a huge fan of The Stooges is was literally sobering for me to read Iggy’s biographies and understand why the Rock’n’Roll animal really is not a thing to be, no matter how self-destructive your tendencies as a youth.

Alien1Being

Misread it as Bourbaki. Meeting Bourbaki would have been quite a feat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

Isamu

Maybe controversial, but I think it’s always a mistake to idolize people instead of strictly something that they did. That’s enough, you enjoy their work, you don’t really need to turn it into an obsession about the person. You can just let the person be who they are and not some projection of your imagination.

jschveibinz

Nicely written longform article!

woopah

It was a pleasant surprise to see that the article wasn't about bashing on Bourdain at all. I was a little scared when I opened it. Like the author, I'm also a little conflicted about travel and tourism. I love seeing how other people live life differently than mine, but I wonder to what extent this becomes a weird poverty fetishization. I also haven't fully decided how to feel when a once-niche place becomes big. On the one hand, it brings life to the local economy, but on the other hand, somehow it loses "authenticity", whatever that means. I currently only travel when I have a specific reason for being there like a certain event or attraction because I find it rather hollow to just be going from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, but maybe that's just a me problem.

arjie

An interesting read but from what I have experienced of his work it seems to reinforce what I’ve come to believe he is: a good essayist and travel journalist (one who brought uncommonly-traveled-to places to a TV audience) mythologized by tragic romantics who primarily experience him through a one-sided parasocial view of his itinerant life. His death (and perhaps the manner of it) canonized him for these people. Perhaps he’d reject such a role but it’s fairly typical of such posthumous worship that saints have their desires and humanity stripped in exchange for being transformed into a two-dimensional shadow that validates the worshippers' beliefs. There’s also the other fan club of food maximalists but those seem to just be looking for a food tour with little of this false intimacy with a public figure. For all that people allege shallowness there, it seems far more healthy, in that what he did can actually give these people what they want.

ripe

A wise article! It's not about Bourdain at all, but about all of us--- how we live a life unexamined, and how to stop doing so.